


Fortress

by imogenbynight



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Death (not Team Free Will), Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Growing Up Together, Hurt/Comfort, John Winchester is a deeply flawed individual, Kidnapping, M/M, Mechanic!Castiel, Murder, Non-linear Tarantino-esque Narrative Structure, Pining, Prolonged Separation, References to Castiel/Other(s), References to Dean/Other(s), Serious Injuries, Touch-Starved Dean, Trigger Warning: Cancer, Trigger warning: imprisonment, Violence, Yes you read that right, but cancer is the real bad guy in this particular situation, serious physical injuries, there are Reasons and they are sad, trigger warning: attempted murder of a child, with extra helpings of hurt, yikes this is a cheerful one
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-07
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-04-18 09:17:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14210001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imogenbynight/pseuds/imogenbynight
Summary: Five years ago, a malignant mass removed from John Winchester's temporal lobe left behind a quietly ticking bomb that nobody noticed until it decimated everything.Five years ago, John dragged Dean away from everything he'd ever known, hellbent on rescuing him from an imagined threat that felt more real to him than the blood on his hands.Five years ago, Castiel let Dean's hand slip through his fingers as he rescued Sam from what he'd thought was a more immediate threat.For five years, Castiel has wondered if there was some way he could have saved Dean, too.Now, with phone call that he'd all but given up hoping for, Castiel has a chance to try again.





	1. November 19, 2000 - After

**Author's Note:**

  * For [schmerzerling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/schmerzerling/gifts).



> An incredibly late fill for Schmerzerling, who (in a shocking twist) wanted Dean as bruised and broken as possible :D
> 
> Posting chapter by chapter as I complete a full rewrite of the less-than-stellar version I'd written during the Godawful Writing Hell Slump of 2017.
> 
> If you're concerned about any of the tags and would like more information before you read, send me a message on tumblr (off anon so I can respond privately) and I'll be glad to fill you in.

**November 19th, 2000**

Castiel is in the garage when the phone rings, flat on his back beneath a jacked-up ’87 Honda Civic that’s in desperate need of more work than he thinks it’s really worth. The radiant heater on the garage wall emits a semi-circle of searing heat that stops before it reaches the car he’s working on, so though his legs feel practically on fire, his fingers are numb as he loosens the screws holding the rusted fuel intake manifold in place. He ignores the phone, gritting his teeth as the last stubborn screw refuses to turn. Finally, it loosens.

The phone is still ringing. Ringing. _Ringing_.

“Bobby!” he shouts.

There’s no reply, and he pushes himself out from under the car with a grunt, wiping his grease-stained hands on his once-tan coveralls as he heads for the attached office. Bobby wheels his way back inside just as he arrives.

“Too busy to answer the damn phone?” Bobby asks. 

Anyone who didn’t know Bobby would think he was serious—and kind of a dick. Castiel, on the other hand, has known his boss for more than half his life, and only rolls his eyes in response.

“I could say the same to you.”

Bobby snorts, his mouth twitching into a barely-there smirk as he lifts the receiver. 

“Singer Auto.”

Castiel doesn’t mean to eavesdrop, but while he stands at the water cooler waiting for his paper cup to fill, he notices Bobby sitting up straighter in his chair. When he speaks again, it’s in the tone he usually reserves for suppliers who try to screw him over or Castiel when he’s feeling particularly argumentative.

“Who’s asking?”

Bobby’s brow furrows at the response he gets, but it’s barely a second before the crease vanishes, his face going slack and pale as he lifts his gaze to Castiel. The sight of him looking so shaken makes Castiel’s stomach toss and turn.

“Yeah, this is Robert Singer.”

_What’s wrong?_ Cas mouths, but though Bobby is staring right at him he doesn’t seem to notice. 

“You’re sure?” Bobby asks after a long pause, and whatever the reply is, it makes his hand shake as he reaches for a pen and scrawls something down on the back of the nearest invoice. Castiel feels his heart in his throat. If something has happened to Ellen, or Jo, or Sam— but Ellen is next door in the house, and Sam and Jo had called Bobby less than an hour ago, so— “Yeah. Yeah, of course. And you’re absolutely sure it’s him?”

Castiel’s head fills with buzzing white noise, and he misses whatever Bobby says next. For an interminable amount of time, he barely even registers Bobby’s voice. He comes back to himself as Bobby takes off his hat to rub at his short hair.

“No, no, I remember the way. We’ll be there soon. Thanks, Sergeant.”

When Bobby puts the phone down, he stares at it for a long, agonizing moment before he finally lifts his head to meet Castiel’s eyes. Castiel knows what he’s going to say before he even opens his mouth. He can feel it, singing thrumming _screaming_ under his skin.

“They found him,” Bobby says, and his voice is shaking as much as his hands are. “They found Dean.”

Castiel closes up the garage in a daze.

Despite the five years that have passed since he was taken from them, and Bobby’s reluctance to even talk about him for the majority of that time, there are still traces of Dean all over Singer Auto. 

The _Star Wars_ calendar that he’d put up in 1994, that nobody had been able to bring themselves to take down when the new year ticked over. The scuff on the back wall where, at fifteen, he’d backed Bobby’s enormous Ford F-350 slightly too far. Even the Craftsman tool set that Castiel uses every single day is technically Dean’s—a Christmas gift that Castiel had been paying off for months before that awful day in October, planned since the day Dean had told him that he’d decided to go to trade school and learn to restore classics.

Castiel’s eyes settle on every single reminder as he moves around the space, and by the time he heads into the house next door, he’s awash in memories that he’s barely allowed himself to think of in years.

In the kitchen, Bobby and Ellen have Sam and Jo on speaker. They’ve been in away in Kansas City for the past few days, competing on his high school's academic decathlon team in the North-East Kansas Regional Scrimmage, which is—for reasons Castiel isn’t entirely clear on—being held in Missouri.

Jo is captain of the debate team, and Sam is on track to eventually be the valdectorian of his graduating class, but right now they’re both crying so hard that they’re barely able to string a sentence together between them. Castiel can just make out the sound of Sam’s girlfriend Jess in the background, murmuring quiet, trying to calm them both down.

_“What about— is he— is Dad—”_

The question is clear, even if Sam doesn’t manage to get it all out. Bobby shakes his head and swipes at his eyes with the back of his hand.

“Detective— Sergeant Ballard didn’t mention John,” he says, which is forboding in and of itself. Sam makes a choked sound, like he’s trying not to feel any particular emotion about it. Castiel can relate.

Standing in the doorway, he shuffles on his feet, awkward and out of place. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do. If he’s supposed to go home, or if Bobby and Ellen want him to come with them to the police station, or to the hospital, or both, or none at all. 

Bobby and Ellen look up at him, then, and Ellen’s forehead creases as she takes in the way he’s fidgeting in the doorway. She spreads an arm out toward him, lip quivering even as she tries to smile, and it’s enough to stop him questioning his welcome.

He wraps his arms tightly around her and tries not to break down, tries to give back as much comfort as he’s taking. He’s more thankful than he could ever express for this family who drew him in and let him linger after Dean was gone, let him hold on to whatever small part of his best friend remained. 

He holds on to Ellen and hopes that she knows it.

“ _I don’t know how soon we can get back,_ ” Jo’s saying now, the line crackling a little as she speaks. 

“ _The team bus isn’t due to leave until tomorrow night,”_ Sam adds, “ _but Jess said she’s pretty sure she has enough money for us to take a Greyhound or something, or I could—_ ”

“I can come get you,” Castiel offers, and Ellen pulls back to look at him, her expression as no-nonsense as it’s ever been. With red-rimmed eyes, it falls slightly short of the usual authority.

“ _Cas, no— you should— you should go with them. Dean will—_ ” Sam’s voice breaks on his brother’s name, and he gulps in a breath before he continues. “ _You should be there._ ”

“He asked for you,” Bobby says, and even under these circumstances, some part of Castiel thrills at the knowledge that Dean wants him there. The giddy feeling comes and goes swiftly, leaving something closer to guilt in its wake. This really isn’t the time. His throat clicks as he swallows. “Sergeant Ballard said he wanted to know about you, and Sam, and—” Bobby’s lips purse momentarily. “And Mary.”

“Then I’ll come get you first thing tomorrow morning,” Castiel says after a moment.

“ _Take my car_ ,” Jo tells him. “ _You’ll burn through twice as much gas if you drive that stupid Continental._ ”

For the first time in the year since he bought it, Castiel doesn’t take offence at Jo insulting his car.

Thanks to the oversized speakers installed in the trunk by the car’s previous owner, Bobby’s wheelchair doesn’t quite fit into the Continental, so the three of them pile into Ellen’s SUV by necessity. Ellen’s hands stay tight on the wheel for the entire journey. 

When she finally pulls into the lone vacant accessible space outside the police station, none of them move a muscle. 

Castiel stares out the window at the squat brick building that hasn’t been updated since the mid-seventies, and he feels _wrong._ He’s certain that the moment he steps out onto the pavement he’s going to fall to his knees and remain there until some outside force makes him stand. His limbs are loose and gangly, too long for his body and detached somehow, like he’s a puppet directed by some inexperienced hand. 

In two more years, he thinks to himself, Dean would have been declared dead in absentia.

“I don’t know if they’ll let you come in for this part, hon,” Ellen says, and Castiel looks up to meet her eyes in the mirror. Her lower lip has all but disappeared into her mouth as she chews it nervously. “They might only want Bobby and me because we’re marked down as his next of kin.”

Nodding, Castiel tugs at a loose thread on the cuff of his hooded maroon sweatshirt. He’s been thinking as much since they climbed into the car, because as close as he and Dean were, as important as Dean is to him, and as much as Dean may have asked the police about him, he’s not family. Not in the way that counts to any kind of authority.

It doesn’t matter that his own family is a formless mess of people without any real connection, or that he spent more of his formative years in the Winchester house than in his own. It doesn’t matter that for the past five years he’s been just as much a part of the Singer-Harvelle clan as Sam had become after this drawn out nightmare began.

On paper, he’s a Novak. On paper, he’s a friend. On paper, he’s just one more witness to a tragedy.

As far as law enforcement is concerned, he’s probably no more entitled to be included in the debrief than any other old school friend of Dean’s. Part of him is almost glad of it. The less detail he’s forced to hear in detached, clinical terms, the better.

“So long as I can come to the hospital after,” he says, and she gives him a watery smile.

He has no memory of climbing from the car, nor of walking through the glass doors of the building, but suddenly he’s following Ellen and Bobby across the speckled linoleum of the waiting area, past a woman arguing with the officer at the front desk about a traffic violation. They can see Sergeant Diana Ballard through the door leading into the Sheriff’s office, talking to an officer Castiel doesn’t recognise, and Special Agent Victor Henriksen.

Ballard had been the lead detective on Dean’s case, right up until Henriksen took over, and at the sound of their voices echoing out to where he stands, Castiel feels his reaction to being here again grow all the more visceral. 

He barely notices the pair walking out to meet them, too lost in the memory of sitting under these same harsh fluorescents as he’d waited to describe the events he’d witnessed. It’s so vivid he can almost smell the smoke.

Henriksen says their names by way of greeting, and he and Ballard shake each of their hands before gesturing toward the meeting room on the left and following them inside. Castiel feels a strange combination of relief and dread when they don’t question his presence.

“Is Sam here?” Ballard asks.

“He’s out of town,” Ellen explains. “Academic Decathlon regionals.”

“Still a bright kid, then,” she smiles, and waits for Ellen and Castiel to sit before she and Henriksen do the same. Folding her hands atop some files on the table, she looks around at the three of them. “So. Good news at last.”

Ellen bursts out with a near hysterical laugh. Bobby reaches over and grips her hand in his own, squeezing it while she nods, steadying herself.

“Wonderful news,” she agrees, and Castiel already finds himself itching to leave. Dean is okay. He’s alive and he’s close—only a few miles away in the trauma center of Via Christi St. Francis, according to the note Bobby had scrawled on that invoice—and Castiel doesn’t want to sit here and listen to someone describe the hell he’s been through. He just wants to _see_ him, to reach out and touch him and know that this is real.

“Well, I’ll start with the basics,” Henriksen says, talking so slow and calm that it makes Castiel even more anxious to head for the hospital. “Dean was found locked in the basement of a farmhouse in Cimarron two days ago, and was airlifted to St. Francis here in Wichita that morning. Sergeant Ballard and I were both notified of a possible ID yesterday.”

“You’ve known for a whole day?” Castiel asks, surprising himself with how harshly he’s spoken, but neither of them seem offended. Ballard turns her patient gaze to him and smiles kindly.

“We had to wait for him to let us know who he was comfortable seeing. In cases like this, we can’t just assume that a traumatized person will be okay with visitors, and the attending doctor asked that we give him some time to acclimatize to his new surroundings before bringing up the topic.”

“So how is he?” Bobby asks.

Victor hesitates.

“I spoke with him for a couple of hours last night, and he was coherent and rational for most of that conversation. But… I’ll be honest with you all—Dean’s not in great shape. Psychologically speaking, the past five years have done some serious damage. When the paramedics tried to move him from the basement where he was found, he panicked and fought them off to the point that he fell back down the stairs, and he’s fractured his collarbone and broken his arm in the process.”

“God,” Ellen murmurs under her breath. “Is he— he didn’t hurt anyone, did he?”

“I checked in with all three paramedics this morning,” Ballard says. “They’re all fine.”

Ellen lets out a low breath, and Castiel understands her relief deeply. If Dean had hurt someone in his moment of confusion, the guilt of it would eat at him. It’s the last thing he needs.

“Good,” she says. “That’s— that’s good.”

“Other than that, he’s also been severely malnourished for a long time, and he’s sustained a number of injuries along the way.”

“What kind of injuries?” Bobby asks.

Henriksen’s lips twitch, his eyes dropping away for a moment, and Castiel gets the distinct impression that he wishes he didn’t have to be the bearer of this particular piece of news. 

“Dean called it ’testing’,” Henriksen says, pursing his lips in visible discomfort for a moment before he resumes his professionally stoic expression. “John would cut him every day to make sure— to prove that he was still human.”

There’s not much that any of them can say to that, but it takes a lot for Castiel to keep himself from hating John. It would be easy to do it, and God knows Castiel has cursed his name more than once over the past five years, but with Dean safe and free, Castiel manages to remind himself that John Winchester did not choose this. His hands may have done the damage, but his mind has not been his own for some time.

“And is John—” Ellen starts and stops, collecting herself as best she can. “Did you find him, too?”

Ballard’s jaw twitches as Henriksen responds.

“The police who found Dean were responding to reports of an assault on a group of teenagers who’d broken into the abandoned farmhouse. When they arrived, they found John pinning one of them in the living room and threatening him at knifepoint. They were left with no choice but to shoot, and he passed shortly after.”

Castiel feels his breath leave him in a rush. He slumps back in his seat and chances a glance over at Bobby, whose eyes are red-rimmed and haunted. Once, John had been his closest friend. Now, he suspects that Bobby is blaming himself—again—for not noticing that his friend had started slipping until it was too late.

He sees Ellen tighten her grip on Bobby’s hand.

“I’m sorry, Mr Singer, I know you were—”

“Did Dean see?” Bobby cuts in before he can finish, and Victor shakes his head.

“He did hear the confrontation, and of course the shots fired, but I don’t believe he saw anything when they brought him through the house.”

“So what now?”

“This kind of trauma is… difficult to map. Being held hostage for that long by someone you’ve trusted from birth makes the brain do funny things. He’s rationalized a lot irrational behaviour because it makes more sense that way, makes it easier to bear. He seems frustrated with himself, though, for giving John’s delusions any kind of weight. That’s a good sign.”

Henriksen offers a tired smile.

“Don’t get me wrong—he’s in for a long, bumpy road, but the fact that he knows on some level that he’s been influenced by John’s delusions means that there’s a good chance—better than good chance—that he’ll get past all of this eventually.”

Castiel barely hears as the conversation moves on. As Bobby asks if Dean knows about Mary’s death, as Henriksen describes what’s going to happen before Dean is due to be discharged from hospital, as Ellen confirms that they do have room for Dean to stay with them at the house, _of course, he’s family_.

Castiel listens to it all as if through a wall. His breath grows more and more shallow.

He feels pinned in place, like a moth in a museum display, spread open for all the world to study. His mouth is bone dry. Tremors run through his limbs.

“Breathe,” Ellen tells him.

Distantly, he’s aware of her palm settling against his back. It should be comforting. She intends it that way. Instead, all he can think about is that for five years, nobody has touched Dean unless it was to cut him open.

He doesn’t have time to fight back the urge to vomit. Somehow, Henriksen seems to know it’s coming, and there’s a waste paper basket in his hands just in time. He retches and retches and retches, heaves until his throat burns. Ellen crouches beside him.

“It’s okay,” she says, hand soothing warm against his back. “It’s going to be okay.”


	2. October 17th, 1995 - Before

** October 17th, 1995 **

It’s dark in the loading dock behind the movie theater, and as dusk settles over Wichita, the fall breeze shifts from cool to bitterly cold. The glow from the street-lamps on East 3 rd Street barely reaches the dumpsters they’re hidden behind.

Castiel huffs under his breath and shoves his hands deeper into the pockets of his coat. He jumps when Dean’s elbow digs into his side.

“Chill, Cas,” Dean grins, bouncing on the balls of his feet and rubbing his hands together before he crosses his arms to trap the warmth against his sides. Shooting him a sidelong glance, Castiel narrows his eyes.

“I _am_ chill. _”_

It’s not a lie. Emotionally speaking, he’s perfectly fine. His restlessness isn’t due to nerves over being caught sneaking around back here, though such fears would be well within reason. He’s just cold and irritated. Benny was supposed to sneak them into the movie almost ten minutes ago, and if he takes much longer they’re going to miss the opening scene. 

Dean seems unconvinced. He nudges Castiel a second time.

“Seriously. If anyone asks what we’re up to back here, we’ll just tell them we’re trying to score some weed.”

He wriggles his eyebrows, inordinately pleased with himself for his joke, but Castiel just rolls his eyes and leans out of reach when Dean tries to prod him again.

“You’re infuriating.”

“And you still chose to be friends with me,” Dean points out. 

Castiel hums in concession.

“My taste is questionable at best.”

“Pssh. You love me.”

Castiel glances at him with a sardonic brow and hopes it’s convincing.

“Do I, though?”

“Ouch. I fuckin’ hope so.”

Dean’s grinning as he says it—he’s _kidding_ , of course he is—but there’s an odd little falter to his smile, and despite all his better judgement Castiel feels his heart pound a little harder. He has to ignore it for his own sanity, and he’s about to make a snarky retort—something along the lines of _I think the word you’re searching for is “wish”_ —when a gruff voice cuts him off.

“You two done flirting? Movie’s about to start.”

Castiel flinches, recognizing the speaker a moment too late to feign indifference to the comment, and Benny smirks from where he leans against the fire door he’s opened from inside. Rather than respond, Castiel just doubles down on his frown, and tries not to notice the way Dean’s expression closes off.

“What took you so long?”

“Manager stuck around later than she was supposed to,” Benny explains with a shrug, and Dean pats him on the shoulder, something about the gesture far too familiar for Castiel’s liking as they walk past him into the building. The corridor inside is dimly lit, and they can hear the trailer for some new kids movie playing through the wall.

“Kinda surprised you even wanted to see this,” Benny says, glancing back in Castiel’s direction as they near the side door to the theater. “Dean said you hated Halloween 5.”

“I didn’t _hate_ it,” Castiel lies, equal parts annoyed that Dean had told Benny as much, and thrilled to have proof that Dean talks about him when he isn’t around.

If he were being honest, he’d admit that not only did he hate the last movie in the series, he also hated the four that preceded it. But when given the choice between seeing an excruciatingly predictable horror movie in Dean’s company, or spending the evening at home alone while his best friend went out with Benny after the movie instead, it was a no-brainer. 

Maybe if some of their other friends were going be here, he’d have made a different choice. But he’s seen how Dean looks at Benny, and he doesn’t want to leave the two of them unattended.

It doesn’t matter that Benny’s got a girlfriend, or that he’s never shown any interest in guys, or that he’s going to be too busy doing his job up in one of the multiplex projection booths to actually sit down with them in the theater.

It also doesn’t matter that it’s mostly just instinct and wishful thinking that tells Castiel that Dean _is_ interested in guys, because that same instinct tells him that if any guy is going to capture Dean’s attention, it’s going to be Benny Lafitte. Nineteen years old, far too muscular for his own good, and the proud owner of a truck that Dean’s been drooling over for the past six months, Benny is the kind of twinkly-eyed, good-natured sweetheart that any decent person would happily push their friend toward.

Even worse, Dean seems to laugh more when they’re hanging out with Benny, and since Dean’s father was diagnosed with some barely pronounceable form of brain cancer— _Oligodendroglioma_ , he reminds himself—his laughter has been uncharacteristically rare. John may have been given the all clear a month ago, but Dean still hasn’t quite bounced back.

So, even though the reaction makes him feel like a supreme asshole, Castiel feels another part of himself shrivel up and die every time Dean smiles at Benny.

It’s a ridiculous form of jealousy. He’s beholden to it regardless.

“You did,” Dean interrupts his thoughts, and it takes a moment for Castiel to remember what they’d even been talking about. The god-awful movie they’re about to see. He frowns harder still and keeps walking, following Benny in the dark and trusting that he knows which door to lead them through.

“I didn’t,” he argues, though he’s not even sure why he’s bothering at this point, just digging in his heels out of pure stubborn pride. “I just said the violence was excessive.”

“No, you said that watching it was ‘a level of masochism just shy of self-immolation’,” Dean says, dropping his voice in an admittedly—irritatingly—accurate impersonation, and then snorting when Castiel scowls at him. “What? You did.”

“Sure sounds like something you’d say,” Benny pipes up.

Castiel grinds his teeth.

“If you’re so sure I’m going to hate this movie, why’d you even ask me come?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Dean says, though both his tone and the elbow he hooks around Castiel’s neck say otherwise.

Benny clears his throat and points toward a door to his right.

_“_ Here,” he says, and ushers them inside, waving off their thanks before heading back down the hallway, presumably to do the job he’s supposed to have been doing this whole time.

The theater is mostly empty, and they head straight for the back row, where Dean kicks his feet up onto the seat in front and pulls a half-full box of Red Vines from the deep pocket of his jacket. He holds the box out to Castiel and shakes it in offer.

“Why do you eat these things?” Castiel asks, even as he takes one. “They taste like the base molecular components of something that isn’t even food.”

“What the hell does that even mean?” Dean laughs, and Castiel tries not to laugh back as he replies.

“Fine. They taste like ass.”

“Huh,” Dean bites down on a Red Vine and grins around it as he asks, “Eaten a lot of ass lately, Cas?”

Thankfully, the lights dim to signal the end of the trailers before Dean’s finished speaking, and Castiel is spared the horror of making eye contact with him as the movie starts.

It doesn’t take long for him to wonder if he’s really been spared at all, because as it turns out, _The Curse of Michael Myers_ is—somehow—even worse than the fifth installment in the franchise. He spends the entire hour and a half so bored that he can hardly even enjoy the occasional accidental brush of Dean’s fingers on his as they share snacks between them.

He’s on his feet the second the credits start to roll.

“So wait,” Dean says as they head down the stairs toward the exit, following a middle aged couple who both seem to have loved the movie as much as Dean did. “Was that Loomis screaming at the end? D’you think Michael actually killed him, or just—”

“Dean, please don’t make me continue think about anything we just saw. Ninety minutes of it was more than enough.” He glances sidelong at Dean, whose expression is rapidly sinking, and sighs. “Yeah, I think so,” he says.

“Same,” Dean says, and flashes a him a grin when they reach the door. He holds it open, letting Castiel step out ahead of him into the freezing night air.

Benny is already outside, leaning against the wall, and struggling with a stubborn lighter. He glances over when he hears them coming, and gives up, slipping the unlit cigarette behind his ear and the lighter back into his pocket.

“Thanks for getting us in,” Dean says once they’re close enough, and Benny grins, eyes flicking over to Castiel before returning to Dean.

“Happy to help.”

“We’re heading back to my place if you want to hang out,” Dean tells him, the words all leaving in a panicked rush, and Castiel wants to scream. Thankfully, Benny turns him down.

“It’s date night, remember? I’m meeting Andrea,” he says, gesturing across the street toward the Italian restaurant where his girlfriend works. “You boys have fun, though.”

“Yeah,” Dean says, and Benny winks as he knocks his knuckles on Dean’s shoulder.

“I’ll see you around.”

He heads off toward the restaurant with a little wave, and Castiel watches Dean watching him leave until he can’t bear it any longer. It’s only a few seconds, but it feels like an eternity. He clears his throat.

“Are you ready to go?” he asks, crossing his arms tightly over his chest, and Dean looks back at him with a hunted look on his face.

“Yeah,” he says, then, taking in Castiel’s stance, he steps a little closer. “Are you cold? Should we call my mom for a ride?” 

He’s already moving toward the payphone that stands on the corner, but Castiel shakes his head.

“Not unless you want to. We’ll warm up once we start walking.”

“Yeah.”

Dean hip checks him as he sets off down the street, turning to walk backwards while Cas catches up to him.

“So. You hated it.”

Castiel opens his mouth to argue, then thinks better of it. He shrugs.

“I preferred the last one,” he says diplomatically.

Dean snorts. 

“Yeah, okay. I won’t bug you about it. You can choose the next thing we watch,” he says, but quickly amends; “At the theater. You already agreed to a Western marathon when we get back to my place, so don’t go trying to convince me to sit through another weirdo German movie.”

“You liked that movie.”

“Eh, it didn’t suck. It’s no _Tombstone,_ though.”

“I did enjoy _Tombstone_ ,” Castiel allows.

“Knew you’d dig the cowboys.”

Castiel’s still relieved enough that Dean reacted well to him coming out a few months ago that he doesn’t bother reminding him that of the two of them, _Dean’s_ the one who gets all weird over leather boots and stetsons. It’s one of the few things that make him think that he’s not the only one of them whose interests extend beyond girls. Rather than say anything about it aloud, he just sighs and rolls his eyes.

“Why do I hang around with you?”

“Because I’m awesome,” Dean grins.

“Whoever convinced you that this level of confidence was remotely charming was deceiving you.”

“Yeah, well whoever convinced you to, uh… they, um…” Dean trails off as his search for a snappy comeback sends him stumbling into the metaphorical woods. “Shut up.”

Castiel smiles. “Well put.”

“You’re such an ass.”

“You are what you eat.”

Castiel imagines that he can actually see Dean’s brain stalling out as he stops walking, and even as he inwardly berates himself for saying something so vulgar and patently untrue—he’s kissed _one_ guy, _one_ time, and isn’t even sure that he’d actually want to do _that_ if given the chance, whether it interests him in theory or not—he can’t help but feel a smug sense of victory at the utterly speechless state he’s left Dean in. 

“Are you coming?” he asks, and turns on his heel, rounding the corner before Dean can respond. He allows himself a smirk when he hears Dean scrambling to catch up, and bites down on his lips when he falls back into step beside him.

“D’you want to head to the arcade?” he asks after a few minutes, and Castiel looks over to see him with his hands in his pockets.

“I only have three quarters,” Castiel tells him.

“Oh,” Dean frowns, patting down his own presumably empty pockets. “Some other time, then.”

He seems strangely subdued.

“Is everything okay?” Castiel asks, and Dean’s head whips up comically fast, his eyes wide.

“Yeah.”

Castiel has known Dean long enough to recognize when he’s lying. Something is _wrong_ , and Castiel isn’t sure if it predates their night at the movies, or if maybe he’d crossed a line with his joke. He doesn’t like not knowing. He especially doesn’t like it when it feels as though this abrupt change in Dean’s mood is his fault. But Dean has always been slow to open up when something is bothering him, and Castiel knows better than to push him.

Instead, he walks slightly ahead and elbows the button at the crosswalk, looking back at Dean as he does.

“You have any Red Vines left?”

“You already ate the last one.”

“Ugh.”

Together, they cross the street, heading for the park that acts as a shortcut between downtown Wichita and their neighborhood in North Central. Though the route isn’t _technically_ any shorter—it might even add a few minutes to their journey, now that Castiel is thinking of it—it’s the way they’ve always walked together.

In the park, Dean weaves his way along the paved path to crunch fallen leaves under his boots. As as they go, Castiel points out those he’s missed. It’s an old habit that they probably should have outgrown years ago, but until Dean tells him he doesn’t care, Castiel’s going to keep directing him to the crunchiest leaves.

He’s just pointed out a good one when Dean veers off the path.

“Where are you going?”

“Don’t feel like going home yet,” Dean calls back, heading for the swing-set that they haven’t used since they were in middle school and wedging himself onto the too-small seat.

“Okay.”

Perching on the adjacent swing, Castiel wraps a hand around the chain and watches Dean rocking back and forth on his heels, waiting for him to work up to whatever it is that’s been on his mind.

“We should take a road trip next year,” he says finally, eyes trained on his feet, and Castiel is so thrown by the unexpected subject that it takes him a minute to understand. “After graduation, I mean. Just you and me. I could drive with you to MIT, maybe.”

“I haven’t been accepted yet,” Castiel tells him.

“You will be.”

Dean’s overconfidence might be tiresome when he jokingly applies it to his own more obnoxious qualities, but Castiel can’t deny that it makes him feel incredibly good when Dean directs it toward him. Sometimes, he thinks about the fact that Dean always seems his most sincere when they’re alone and he’s encouraging Castiel, and has to take a few deep breaths to keep from going out of his mind with the happy-giddy-wild feeling it instills in him.

This particular instance, however, is tempered by the specifics of the topic.

“I don’t want to think about it,” he admits, and Dean looks at him in confusion.

“Getting into your dream school?”

“Leaving Wichita.”

“You’ve wanted to ditch your folks for years, Cas.”

“They’re not the only people in this city,” Castiel tells him, and looks away when he sees the flush spreading across Dean’s cheeks, because though they both know that being apart is going to suck, it’s not something that either have acknowledged out loud. Even the thought of voicing his fear that Dean will forget about him is enough to make his throat close up. “Have you decided whether or not to take Bobby up on his offer?”

“I dunno,” Dean says, pushing himself off the ground fully and swinging back out of Castiel’s line of sight. He appears again a moment later, skidding his boots over the the sand below. “I mean, I know he’d be a good boss, and he’s already taught me a ton, but isn’t it, like… I dunno. Cheating?”

“Using the resources and connections available to you isn’t cheating unless you’d be wildly under qualified without them.”

Dean grunts, and it’s obvious that he’s still unsure, even though he’s got no argument for Castiel’s logic.

“You’d be able to get into MIT, too, you know,” Castiel tells him. “If you wanted.”

“I guess,” he says, and Castiel is glad that he’s at least managed to retain some of what Castiel had told him the last time he became convinced that he wasn’t smart enough. He’s never been one to hold back from an argument.

“Do you want my opinion?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve known Bobby for almost as long as you have, and he doesn’t strike me as the sort of person who would put his business on the line for someone out of some sense of obligation. If he’s offered to take you on, it’s because he thinks you’ll be able to do the job and do it well. Don’t turn him down just because you’re worried that you don’t deserve it.”

“What if I don’t, though?”

“That’s not up to you to decide,” Castiel tells him.

Dean is silent for a while after that, swinging slowly as he considers everything that Castiel has said. Castiel has always appreciated that about him; behind the brash and careless exterior that Dean performs for the world, he’s got an incredible capacity for thoughtfulness. He only wishes that Dean were comfortable enough in himself to let everyone else see it.

“Anyway,” Castiel says after a while, when Dean’s swinging grows faster. “As much as I’d like to take a road trip with you, I don’t think my hypothetical move to Massachusetts is the best time for it. We’d need to take my car, and you’d end up having to fly back here after.”

Dean’s face falls.

“Didn’t think of that,” he admits, then rallies, twisting the chains of the swing around as he turns his seat to face Castiel. “Why don’t we go before you leave, then? Drive down to the beach, somewhere in Texas. Or we could do New Orleans. That could be cool.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Castiel says, then shivers, the night air growing steadily more frigid the longer they sit here. “Should we keep walking?”

Dean chews on his lip, like he’s trying to find an excuse to stay a little longer, or find some other thing to say, but he stands without saying a word and shoves his hands back into his pockets.

“‘Kay,” he says, turning to head back toward the path without waiting for Castiel to say anything else. It makes Castiel inordinately nervous.

“Dean?” he calls out, and Dean stops walking without turning around. Knowing that it’s a risky move, Castiel rounds him, trying to catch his eye. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

To his surprise, Dean not only meets his gaze head on, but actually gives him a somewhat straight answer.

“I, uh. It’s nothing, I’m just—” he sighs, looking away again. “It’s stupid.”

“I’m sure it’s not,” Castiel says, and Dean nods, chewing on the inside of his cheek as he stares at the ground. “Is it… is your dad—?”

He can hardly even bring himself to ask, but if John’s cancer has come back, it would explain why Dean’s so reluctant to go home. Castiel feels sick to his stomach at the thought of the Winchester family having to go through the hell of treatment all over again. It had been horrible enough the first time.

But Dean is quick to shake his head.

“No. I mean, he’s not great, but he’s just… he’s the same.”

_The same,_ as Castiel understands it, means paranoid and angry; an often frightening facsimile of the man that John Winchester had been before. It’s not good news, but at least it isn’t _worse,_ and it doesn’t explain Dean’s sinking mood since they left the movie theater.

“So…”

“I, uh— I’m—”

“Dean.”

Dean looks up, and Castiel doesn’t think he’s ever seen him look so scared. It makes his blood run cold. Dean’s never shied away from telling him _anything_ before—at least not once he’d worked up the nerve to mention that there was something to tell.

“Are you sick?” he asks, the words almost lodging in his throat before he can get them out, and Dean’s eyes widen before he frantically shakes his head, grabbing hold of Castiel’s shoulder.

“No, no, I’m fine, it’s just— I’m— _fuck_.”

Dean shakes his head again and mutters under his breath, so quiet that Castiel doesn’t think he was supposed to hear. 

_“God, how did you do this without having a panic attack?”_

Castiel’s mind races, trying to figure out what on Earth he’s ever done that would warrant a panic attack, and— something clicks. A puzzle piece sliding into place in Castiel’s mind.

Five months ago, he’d confessed to Dean that he’d kissed Balthazar, and one of the first things Dean had wanted to know was if he’d been scared to tell him.

Staring at him now, Castiel knows exactly what Dean’s struggling to verbalize, and his stomach flips wildly. For a brief moment, he’s overcome with almost giddy anticipation; if Dean is finally trying to tell him what he _thinks_ he’s trying to tell him, then maybe Castiel’s got a chance.

But then he remembers the way Dean’s been smiling at Benny, and that this downward spiraling mood had only seemed to start after Benny declined to hang out later tonight, and his heart sinks again.

Even though Castiel is relatively certain that nothing will ever actually happen between Dean and Benny, he doesn’t want Dean to actually talk to him about his crush. He’s not sure he can deal with that level of unintentional rejection.

Swallowing around the lump in his throat, Castiel tries for a comforting smile, and does the most selfish thing he’s ever done in his life.

“Whatever it is, Dean, if talking about it is this hard, maybe you should trust your instincts.”

His eyes prickle even as he says it, and he looks away from Dean toward the park’s edge, where a few unfamiliar kids from another school are jumping their bikes over a gutter and laughing loud. He envies their uncomplicated happiness, and hates them for it. He hates himself even more.

“Yeah,” Dean says, and his voice is thick and rough until he clears his throat and plasters on a smile that Castiel doesn’t buy for a second. “You’re probably right.”


	3. A few long days in October, 1995 - During

John hits a pothole, and a sharp shock of pain drags Dean unwillingly back to consciousness. 

The warm, peaceful dark he’s been dwelling in for some unknown amount of time slips away in an instant, replaced by the blinding flare of oncoming headlights and a fear so all-encompassing that it’s like a physical touch on the back of his neck, something vile pressing against his teeth. The car thuds over another dip in the road. He flinches, and the motion sets off the pain again. It runs like a current through his left wrist and down into his fingertips, forking off at every misaligned joint. The skin is numb. He feels the jarring tremor in his bones anyway. 

Looking at his hand is a mistake. It’s twisted to one side, sitting at an unnatural angle that makes him queasy to see, and bruises in the shape of John’s fingers extend from just below his thumb, down his forearm. Every attempt at moving his fingers is less successful than the last.

Staring at the mottled skin, he finds himself thinking about a kid who got lost one summer while they were in fourth grade. Garth had been too adventurous for his own good, and the year before his family had moved someplace out of state, he’d wandered off from a camping trip in Syracuse and slipped down a steep dune. The fall broke his ankle clean in half. It was two days before the search party found him, half buried under the sand.

Garth had been okay, mostly, and had told the whole story to anyone who’d listen as many times as he could get away with, but in the two days that it took for him to get medical treatment, the broken bones in his ankle had started to stitch back together wrong. The doctors had needed to re-break it and set it, and Garth had ended up with an uneven gait anyway.

Dean knows, without a doubt, that he’s not going to be as lucky as Garth. His wrist has already been broken for hours, but he’ll be lucky if he can convince John to stop driving for long enough for Dean to make a splint for himself. Again, he tries to wriggle his fingers, and manages to shift his thumb a few millimetres. It’s all he can manage, now. A part of him thinks that it might be all he’s ever going to manage.

He swallows against the nausea that follows the movement. Swallows again when it doesn’t pass. Realizes, too late, that he hasn’t taken a breath in several long seconds, and sucks one in with all the desperation of someone who’s just burst out of the ocean.

Somehow, breathing isn’t the automatic process that it should be; he has to focus just as hard on drawing in the next lungful of air, and the one after that.

Beside him, John is hunched over the steering wheel, shrouded in shadow. When they pass under a streetlight, sickly yellow light glints off his eyes and casts his features into harsh relief. Dean’s skin prickles all over at the sight. Moments later, his vision dips and fades and grows unbearably fuzzy. 

The wave passes as swiftly as it came on, and it only takes a few minutes for the world to come back into focus. He takes everything in in pieces. The road rushing by outside. The dull throb behind his temple. The loose coins rattling in the truck’s center console, and the blood-and-gravel stained holes in his jeans. His grazed knees and palms, stinging. The bones in his wrist that feel too loose beneath too-tight skin, shifting and grinding together every time he tries to move his fingers. John’s profile, rendered entirely alien by the darkness that seems to have swallowed him up from the inside out. The smell of smoke. 

The smell of blood—his own, his mother’s, his brother’s—clinging to his clothes.

Dean looks away from John, his head swimming as he tries to wrap his head around the incomprehensible realities of the past few hours. John killed Mary. He tried to kill Sam. He might have killed Cas. Everyone Dean loves,  _ gone _ , all because the surgery that was supposed to make everything better had resulted in hallucinations far worse than anyone could have anticipated. They'd known that it was possible, but the chances were slim, and at the time, it had seemed like a risk worth taking.

Hindsight is a bitch, Dean thinks.

The hallucinations started small. Little auditory things that nobody realized were happening until John snapped at Sam to stop talking through an episode of Magnum P.I. when Sam wasn’t even in the room. It shifted into something more difficult to deal with a few days later. 

A full-blown hallucination—some horrific flashback of his active duty—that had John cowering in the corner of the laundry, convinced that they were under attack. But they had stopped after a few days, and until yesterday, John hadn’t had a single one for close to two weeks. At least, none that any of them were aware of. For all Dean knows, John’s current paranoid delusions have been festering this whole time.

“ _ They’re demons _ ,” he’d told Dean as he dragged him out of the house, smearing blood along his arm as Dean twisted in his grip, desperate to get back inside, to get Sam out before the fire could spread, to make sure Cas didn’t get hurt trying to help him, to try to wake his mom up, somehow, somehow, because  _ she’s not dead, not really, she can’t really be _ —

He forces another breath and tries to count himself lucky that John doesn’t see a demon lurking behind Dean’s eyes, too. He tries to be grateful. 

Instead, he just feels guilty. Because Mary was an artist, and the kind of mom that other kids all wished they had—a little reckless, a little wild, more like an older sister than a parent—and Sam was a prodigy, a twelve-year-old genius who excelled at everything he set his mind to.

But, somehow, Dean’s the only one who John didn’t come after with a knife. He doesn’t understand why John saved  _ him _ —why  _ he _ was deemed pure, of all of them. He’s nothing compared to Sam, nothing compared to Mom. He barely scraped through this year of high school.

Sam could have amounted to something. Mom already  _ was _ something.

He can feel his thoughts spiralling, pushing him down into a pit of grief so big it’s likely to swallow him whole, and with every ounce of hope he can scrape together, he forces himself to stop. It was too late for Mom—she was already gone when he and Cas arrived at the house—but Sam had been conscious enough to pound on the basement door and call for help, and the fire wasn’t that bad yet. Cas got him out. He got Sam out, and they’re both okay. Dean knows they are. 

They have to be.

When he risks another look at John, he can see his lips moving rapidly, but he can’t make out a sound. Dean has to work at speaking for a long time before anything comes, and when it does, it’s a small, weak, “Dad?”

Abruptly, John’s lips stop moving, and he turns his head to look at Dean. There’s blood splattered on his jaw, on the collar of his gray work shirt, and Dean doesn’t know whose it is. His eyes are frantic. This man may be John Winchester, but he’s not Dean’s dad. Not anymore.

It’s with a sickening lurch that Dean wonders if this is what John had seen in Mary when he killed her. If this is what he saw in Sam. Some twisted thing crawling just beneath the surface, making a familiar face look like an ill-fitting mask. The skin of his wife stretched over a monster’s frame.

The fear grips Dean tighter than before, constricting his lungs.  _ Breathe in, _ he reminds himself.  _ Breathe out. _

“Fasten your seatbelt,” John says, and despite the blood, despite the manic look on his face, his voice sounds entirely level. Entirely calm. If Dean closed his eyes, John’s voice might be able to convince him that this is just a normal night. That they’re on their way to Sam’s lacrosse game, or heading over to Ellen’s place for a BBQ. “I think I shook them, but I can’t be sure.”

Dean shifts his broken wrist out of the way as he uses his good hand to latch the belt. The fact that it’s not already fastened makes him feel slightly better about the fact that he can’t remember getting into the truck. The dull ache in his temple—and a bump, he finds as he gingerly lifts his fingers to graze over it—draws forth a vague memory of his head smacking against the roof as he was shoved into the passenger seat.

How long it’s been since then is a mystery he lacks the tools to solve—the clock on the dashboard has been broken for months, permanently stuck on 1:18—and the sky is still just as dark and clouded as it was when he and Cas left the park a little after eleven o’clock. It must have been getting close to midnight by the time they arrived back at Dean’s house, but from that point on, time started to move in unpredictable ways. Too slow and too fast all at once. Lurching. 

Dean remembers single seconds as though they spanned entire days, each fragment rendered in his mind's eye with startling clarity. At the same time, he’s missing entire minutes. Maybe even hours.

The seconds he remembers are the ones he wishes he didn’t. He forcibly stops himself from thinking of any of it, and instead looks outside, hoping to see something that will give him some idea of how he can convince John to pull over. To get help. To stop.

But the street rushing by is flanked by an unfamiliar stretch of graffiti-covered factories. Crumbling brick warehouses. A laundromat. A block later, they pass a closed-down gas station— _ Yukon Drive n’ Go _ , the sign reads—and Dean realizes that wherever they are, it’s nowhere he knows. He’s not even sure which direction they’re headed in, or what John intends to do when they get to where they’re going. 

For all he knows, John is going to drive the two of them clear off a bridge.

The night wears on and on and on, and Dean’s eyes sting with the effort of staying awake.  _ I’m probably in shock, _ he thinks, in a distant kind of way, as John weaves from street to street, highway to highway. Eventually the sun bleaches the edges of the clouded sky. Dean blinks, bleary, and realizes they’re headed west just before he catches sight of a sign announcing their imminent arrival in Amarillo, Texas. He’s not sure when they crossed the state border. John has changed direction so many times that he’s not even sure how many state borders they’ve crossed.

There’s a hawk perched on the sign. As they draw closer, a peal of thunder rolls over them, and the hawk leaps into the air, wings spread wide. John swerves onto the median as though he’s under attack, the truck fishtailing wildly as he veers onto a nameless side road. South. They’re headed south, now. Dean repeats the direction in his head a few times in the hope that holding on to this one thing, the direction in which they’re driving, will keep him sane until he can find some way to save himself.

Surreptitiously, he leans back in his seat and tries to make out the gas gauge. It’s running low. No matter what, John is going to have to stop driving sooner rather than later. When he does, Dean decides, he’s going to run. If he has to barricade himself inside a gas station, he’ll do it. He just needs help. Someone with access to a phone and two functioning hands. Anyone.

Until then, he considers trying to talk some sense into John. He approaches it a dozen different ways in his head. Gently. Harshly. By playing along until he can make John realize for himself that none of this makes sense. But every version ends the same. He can’t imagine a scenario that doesn’t result in John thinking that Dean is one of them, too.

It’s maybe an hour later when John pulls over without warning, and Dean feels his stomach in his throat. They’re in the middle of nowhere, out among the wide, sparse plains of West Texas. Without a word, John climbs out of the truck and pulls a red 20 gallon jerry can out from among his tool boxes. It sloshes as he pops open the fuel cap. Dean stares at him in the mirror as he fills the tank, and his plan to run fizzles and dies.

The nearest sign of life are some distant cars driving along a parallel road, and no matter how fast he moves, Dean knows that he’s never going to make it all that way without stumbling. Even if he made a break for it, the moment John catches up with him, he’d have no way to defend himself. Unless…

He looks around the cab of the truck, taking advantage of the brief lack of supervision, and finds a steering lock in the glove compartment. It’s heavy and solid, and he could use it, he thinks. If he has to. He could knock John out and get away. But almost as soon as he has the idea he tosses it aside. His wrist is such a mess that he thinks he’d be lucky if he could pick up a pencil, and wielding the heavy lock one-handed is going to get him nowhere. Besides, if he took off and left John here, who knows what he’d do between Dean leaving and help arriving.

He could flag down some stranger and see the devil in them. Their blood would be on Dean's hands.

Staring down at the steering lock, Dean feels tears welling and spilling over against his will, and doesn’t notice John climbing back into the car until it’s too late. He catches hold of Dean’s arm, and Dean cries out as shards of splintered bone grind against each other, digging into the already damaged flesh.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for something to eat,” he lies through pain-clenched teeth, and gasps when John’s grip tightens. “Dad, you’re hurting me.”

John winces and shakes his head.

“Look what they’ve done to you,” he says, as though he has no idea that he’s the one who did this. He drops Dean’s hand and reaches for the other, and Dean’s so scared that he’s going to break it, too, that he struggles. “Hold still,” John tells him. “I need to be sure.” Dean holds still, and before he can process what’s happening, John produces a knife from God knows where and slices into Dean’s hand. He watches intently as blood fills Dean’s palm.

After a minute, John seems satisfied. From the pocket of the door, he grabs a wad of paper napkins and thrusts them into Dean’s hand.

“Here.”

“What were you looking for?” Dean asks before he can think better of it, and John looks over at him and says, “I had to be sure.”

“Be sure of what?”

“They do something to the blood. I had to make sure it was still yours.”

They seem to drive in circles for hours after that, cutting back and forth across the state, following the nameless dirt roads that run between well-kept ranches and dusty plains until they end, and then weaving through small towns and big cities alike. Dean finds himself cataloguing the things they pass as a way to keep from screaming.

A sign advertising a cook-off in Crowell, evidently the “Wild Hog Capital of the World”, and an abandoned brick elementary schoolhouse in Close City. A white brick church somewhere south of Tahoka. A convoy of silver Airstream campers parked along the side of the road near Carlsbad, New Mexico, when they snake over the border. More overgrown stretches of vacant land scattered with rusted farm machinery and beat-up cars than he can count.

Near Sweetwater, they come across a nasty car accident with a handful of cops directing traffic around the debris. When he sees the flashing lights on their cruisers, Dean feels a bubble of hope forming in his chest, but John doesn’t even flinch at the sight of them. He drives right by, as though he hasn’t done a single thing to warrant police interest. 

Dean stares out the window, willing one of them to glance in his direction. Willing someone to notice, to  _ do something _ . Surely his face has been on the news by now. Surely someone is looking for them.

They drive past the cops slowly, and Dean’s entire body feels tense as a guitar string. Nobody notices. Nobody does a thing. 

He’s not sure why he thought they might. Despite all the direction changes, John isn’t driving erratically anymore. Since he tested Dean’s blood, he’s been sticking to the limit, indicating at every turn.

As visibly tense as he is up close, to an outside observer, he must look completely harmless. Dean can’t help but wish he’d start speeding again, if only to attract someone’s attention. If someone could see him, could recognize him, then at least, if nothing else, they could get word back to Sam and Cas that he was still alive.

It’s the first time he’s allowed himself to truly believe that Sam and Cas made it out of the house, and he pictures them sitting in the police station in Wichita. Cas would be rigid in his seat, expression guarded. Sam would be vibrating with anger and pain that he’d refuse to show until someone pushed him too far. He hopes it’s not Cas who does. The last thing either of them need is to fight with each other.

He has no idea what’s going to happen to Sam. If he’ll end up in foster care, or if he’ll go to live with Grandpa Campbell in Iowa. He’s not sure which would be worse.

Time keeps passing. Between one blink and the next, they’re miles from the car accident, somewhere to the east of an Air Force base near San Angelo. A series of low-flying fighter jets sweep overhead in formation, glinting silver against the dark cloud, and as Dean watches them, a fork of lightning cracks the sky ahead.

Rain has been threatening to fall for a few hours, and as though the lightning had shaken it loose, it finally starts to fall. Fat drops hit the windscreen, bursting and running down the glass in rivulets, and John swerves, tires spinning as he makes another abrupt turn. Calm driving, it seems, is a thing of the past. A vein in John’s forehead pulses visibly. He grips the wheel even tighter than before.

“They’re here,” he says, voice raw and thick as he peers over the steering wheel toward the dark clouds rolling above them, and Dean’s stomach lurches.

“Who?” 

John lets out a desperate sob of a sound that makes Dean’s skin prickle all over.

“Demons. They’re in the water. That’s how they took—“ John’s voice cracks, and he shifts his hands on the wheel. Dean’s eyes are drawn to the blood that stains his cuffs. There’s dirt under his fingernails that Dean didn’t notice before, and he doesn’t know where it’s from. “You don’t let any water touch you, okay? Promise me.”

“I promise,” Dean says without hesitation. “But, Dad—“

“Only holy water from here on out, Dean. I don’t want to have to kill you, but I can’t take risks. We have to stay vigilant.”

Instinctively, Dean presses himself into the door away from John, clutching his shattered wrist toward his chest. John nods frantically, his lips moving again as he mutters something under his breath. Dean can just make it out, this time. Nonsense sounds shaped into something vaguely resembling language. He gets louder as the rain gets heavier, and by the time it starts to pour, he’s practically shouting.

The rain on the windshield distorts the road outside, making the headlights of oncoming traffic bend and warp, and John doesn’t slow down or stop ranting until the rain starts to ease. When it does, he pulls into a multi-story parking garage in downtown San Angelo.

He doesn’t say a word. Just screeches to a stop on the second floor and climbs out of the truck, leaving Dean alone. Before he slams the door, he meets Dean’s eyes and says, “Don’t move.” 

For a moment, Dean wonders if this is it. If this is his chance to run. But then he sees John opening a lockbox on the back of the truck to take out a tool bag and a shotgun, and his throat closes up. His palms sweat.

He wishes that he could tell himself that this isn’t real. That it’s all some awful nightmare. But dreams aren’t this vivid. Dreams don’t have all of this mundane waiting in between the moments of horror. He watches in the rear view as John crosses the parking lot, heading for the only other cluster of cars in the place. There’s an ancient Buick, rust-orange everywhere that it isn’t flaking dull green, and beside it, a gray late-80’s Elantra, like the one Swayze drives in  _ Roadhouse _ . It’s a bland, unassuming kind of car, and John makes a beeline for it.

Dean watches as he slips a length of wire from his tool bag and works it into the tiny gap around the window. He wriggles the lock until it pops open. In another circumstance, Dean might have thought it was kind of cool that his dad knows how to break into a car. It seems like the kind of skill that an action hero would have. He wonders if that’s what John feels like right now. 

Because he didn’t want to kill Mary. He didn’t want to kill Sam. He wanted to save them all from the demons that were crawling under their skin, and it didn’t matter that those demons weren’t real, because he believed that they were. In his own mind, he  _ knew _ that they were.

Dean feels bile rising, and it makes his throat burn. His mouth floods with saliva. He wills himself not to vomit, and cracks open a window to let some fresh air into the stuffy car, but all that drifts inside is the smell of stale exhaust fumes, and it makes his head ache. He’s hungry and exhausted and he wants to be sick and he wants to scream and cry and he wants to strangle his father and he wants to run and run and run and he wants, more than anything, to go home. 

But home isn’t there anymore. Mom isn’t there. Maybe Sam isn’t, either. Maybe even Cas has been lost. Fire spreads fast, after all, and there’s all that blank space after John threw Dean into the car. Maybe he went back inside. Maybe he went back and slashed their throats. Maybe he shot them both.

The hope he’d felt before, the certainty that they’d both survived, has all but evaporated.

At once, as though someone has flicked on a projection screen, Dean sees his mother’s body slumped against the wall. Her blue eyes vacant. Sam screaming. Sam screaming. Heat. Fire. Smoke. Cas turning to push him back outside. His dad’s hand around his wrist, pulling him away. The bones shifting, cracking, splintering. Cas’ eyes flicking down, widening at the sight of the knife in John’s hand. Sam screaming. Pounding on the basement door.

Dean doesn’t even realize he’s hyperventilating until John pulls the door open again, but his breath is coming short and sharp and fast, and he feels like he’s even closer to being sick than he was before, and his head spins and spins, and John opens the door and his voice seems muffled somehow, like Dean’s head is stuffed with cotton wool, and he says, _ I told you not to move, you idiot, they could get you, Dean. They could take you from me like they took Sam. Like they took your mom. I don’t have anyone else, you’re all I have left. We’re all that’s left, please,  _ **_please_ ** _ , just listen to me, stay where I tell you, do as I tell you, stay safe, stay alive. _

And he’s ranting, ranting, and Dean heaves a breath and says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I promise, I’m safe.”

But John has this manic look in his eye, and Dean doesn’t think he’s ever going to be safe again.

“Get out of the car.”

Dean’s afraid to ask questions, or to even answer, so he opens the door. Climbs out. He moves slowly. Carefully. No sudden movements. He closes the door.

“This way,” John says, and signals the direction with the butt of his shotgun before grabbing what few belongings they have from the back. Dean hears things rattling in a duffel bag. Metallic things. Knives and guns and bullets. That’s all John brought. Weapons. 

Not food or clothing or anything they might actually need, but knives and guns and bullets. 

“Move, Dean.”

Dean moves, heading toward the Elantra, and John follows closely behind. The car is already running, and the doors are open wide. Most of the owner’s possessions have been turned out of the glove compartment and the seat pockets and strewn on the ground. The interior reeks of cigarette smoke and Juicy Fruit chewing gum. Dean’s stomach lurches all over again.

Before he knows it, John’s tearing out of the parking lot and down the street, and they’re going, going, going, and they don’t stop again until the car runs out of gas. John has the presence of mind to strip off his blood-stained shirt before he goes inside to pay. They’ve crossed another border, but Dean’s not even sure which one. He feels like he’s been awake for a week, but according to the time on the Elantra’s dash it’s not quite twenty-four hours since he and Cas left the theater.

Not even a day. It seems impossible.

The last time he woke up in his bed, he’d had a nervous flock of butterflies in his stomach, because—

God, it seems so stupid, now.

He’d made Cas a mixtape. For the whole day, from the minute he woke up until that moment in the park when he’d lost his nerve, it had been burning a hole in his pocket. It was  _ perfect _ . He’d spent days planning it to make sure it was perfect. Hours putting it together. Weeks waiting for the right time, psyching himself up and making absolutely certain that he was ready to lay it all on the line.

It blew both of his previous forays into the composition of crush-fueled mixtapes—Cassie Robinson, in the seventh grade, and Lisa Braeden, in the ninth—clean out of the water.

The tape he’d made for Cassie was poorly planned. He only included songs that he liked, and didn’t give a whole lot of thought to finding ones that she would. It was an autobiography, concerned more with telling her, _ this is who I am, and you should be into that _ , than giving her the space to know him for herself. It certainly didn’t give her the chance to say anything in return.

He saw it the second that she said thank you as she’d looked at the track list. It was the same kind of thank you that he’d given to his grandparents when they gave him a Jefferson Starship album for Christmas.

With Lisa, he made the opposite mistake. Every song was one she already loved, and there was none of him in it at all. Though they’d only dated for a couple of weeks after he’d given it to her, she’d played it on repeat every time they hung out, and Dean had wanted to scream. He hated every single song.

The tape he made for Cas was different. He knew Cas liked the songs, and he loved them himself, but it wasn’t even about the songs so much as about what each song said. What each song meant. Every track was another line of his confession. Every note was another reason why he’d decided to take this risk.

Absentmindedly, he presses his good hand to the pocket of his jeans, and finds it flat. He checks his other pockets and comes up with nothing but a crumpled movie ticket. Two crumpled movie tickets. He’d folded them in half and stuffed them in his pocket in a fit of hopeful sentimentality that makes him so deeply ashamed now, because while he and Cas had been meandering through the park, while Dean had been trying to work up the nerve to tell Cas what had been eating at him since the day he’d learned that Cas had kissed Balthazar.

But he’d lost his nerve, and now the tape is gone. At some point between leaving the park and being dragged into his dad’s truck, the tape must have slipped from his pocket. For all he knows it’s melted on the floor of the house. The cellulose sending acrid black smoke curling toward the ceiling until the ceiling crashed down on top of it.

But maybe Cas found it.

He thinks about it for a few minutes, lets his mind wander. Imagines Cas in his well-ordered room, sitting with his back against the bookshelves, knees curled to his chest, headphones pressed over his ears and the tape playing through them. Imagines him hearing Dean’s confession woven into familiar music, and smiling. Imagines Cas telling him he understood. Imagines Cas cupping his cheeks and kissing him. 

He loses himself to the fantasy until John hits another pothole and everything comes flooding back, and he feels so profoundly ashamed, so guilty for letting himself daydream  _ now _ , after everything, and—

“ _ Mom _ ,” he says, under his breath. Quiet, soft. And John hears him, and John says, “ _ Don’t _ .”

And even though the nausea has long since passed,  and his stomach is empty to the point of rumbling, he throws up. He retches and retches, and John pulls to the side of the road. Dean tumbles out across the gravel shoulder into the grass, a shock of agony running through his arm at when he puts weight on his mangled wrist, and the grass is wet with old rain, and John is screaming for him not to touch it. But he can’t stop. He retches until his throat is raw and his jaw aches and his eyes blur and sting. And when John pulls him to his feet and stares at him, Dean’s certain that this is the end. 

He’s touched the water, and now John is going to think that he’s one of them, and he’s going to kill him, and Dean doesn’t know what to do.

But he doesn’t. 

Somehow, John looks at him and still sees his son. Dean doesn’t know whether to be thankful or furious. He doesn’t know if he wants to be spared when his mother and brother were not, but he gets no choice, and John bundles him back into the car, and they drive. They drive for miles.

The blacktop is patchy and rough. They head north, then south, then east again, weaving through countless little nameless towns with nothing to show for themselves beyond barely functional gas stations that double as their general stores. When signs start telling them that they’re approaching Galveston, Dean wonders if they’ll actually make it that far before John changes directions again.

Time slips. Starts. They pass through Galveston, and then somehow they’re in Dallas. Fort Smith, Arkansas. It’s just after dawn—another day, Dean’s losing track—when a new sign welcomes them to Louisiana, and John speaks for the first time in hours.

“We’re nearly there,” he says, but he still hasn’t told Dean where “there” is. 

What his goal is beyond  _ get away— _ or what he intends to do once they manage it—remains a mystery.

For once, though, it seems that he’s true to his word. After another hour he pulls into the parking lot of an old motel that looks like it’s been closed for a decade. Dean doesn’t bother to ask him where they are. He can barely see anymore. He’s too tired and hungry and sick and in too much pain to read any more signs, and he suspects that the only reason John is pulling over now is because he can’t see straight either. 

A huge tree, weighed down with Spanish moss, stands in the centre of the horse-shoe shaped building. John uses it as a shield to hide the car from the road. He makes Dean wait while he goes inside. When he comes back, almost twenty minutes later, his hands are smeared with something dark.

The room he leads Dean into is at the back of the building, and the walls are covered in crude symbols. The smell of charcoal is almost overwhelming.

“We should be safe here for now,” John says, wiping his hands on his jeans. Black smears on blue denim. “Just while I get some rest, and then we need to keep moving.”

He looks at Dean while he’s speaking, but doesn’t seem to see him. His eyes rove around, never settling on any one part of Dean’s face, and though Dean is still clutching his wrist to his chest, John doesn’t ask if he’s okay. They haven’t eaten in days. Dean’s throat is dry and his mouth tastes like hell and his stomach feels hollow and he’s in so much pain that he doesn’t think he could sleep if someone paid him.

“Where are we going?” he asks.

“I don’t know yet. But it’s not going to be safe here for long. They’ll find us.”

With a glance out the window toward the truck stop across the street, Dean shifts on his feet.

“Do you think I could go get us something to eat?” 

John starts shaking his head before Dean’s even finished speaking.

“It’s not safe. Don’t worry, I’ll find something soon.”

Dean nods, jaw tensing briefly, and breathes deep through his nose.

“Okay, Dad.”

John stands guard for an hour, and Dean feigns sleep until finally, John seems to decide that there’s no imminent threat. He listens as he settles onto the floor nearby, waiting for his breathing to even out. As soon as it does, Dean carefully pushes to his feet. His wrist protests with the movement, but he grits his teeth against the pain and moves toward the door. 

It’s late, but there are still a few trucks in the parking lot, and he can smell fries cooking at the roadside diner from here. Salty. Hot. His mouth waters as he looks at the doorknob.

He could do it. He could open the door. Cross the street. Go into the truck stop. Call for help. Eat something. Breathe.

His good hand is inches from the doorknob before he hesitates.

John’s paranoia has reached such a fever pitch that he’ll likely shoot anyone who comes close to the door. No matter how Dean plays it out in his head, calling for help means certain death—for his would-be rescuers, or for Dean, or for John—and even after what John has done, what his delusions have made him do, Dean can’t be responsible for any of that. 

Even in a best case scenario, if nobody gets killed, John is going to spend the rest of his days in the psych ward of some prison, either realising what he’s done, or believing with everything in him that the people closest to him were possessed by demons. Believing that his only surviving son abandoned him.

There’s no happy ending for John Winchester. 

As far as Dean can see, there’s no happy ending for him, either.

Still, he thinks about it. Imagines crossing the road. Imagines walking between the old gas pumps to the payphone. Imagines picking up the receiver.

In his mind, it’s Cas that he calls. He’s only ever known two phone numbers by heart—his own, and the Novak house—and only one of those is still functioning.

In his mind, it’s Cas that answers the phone, even though Dean doesn’t think he’s ever been the one to pick up the Novak house phone in his life. In his mind, Cas picks up, and Dean says  _ Hey, Cas,  _ and Cas cries at the sound of his voice. 

And in his mind—

Across the room, John snorts in his sleep and rolls over, and as he does, the shotgun under the bag he’s using as a pillow scrapes across the carpet. Dean’s fantasy dies as swiftly as if John had shot it.

He’s never getting away. He’s never going home. 

With a feeling like someone has filled his stomach with cement, he returns to his place on the floor and lies down. Sleep does not come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to Maria for her invaluable feedback during the editing process <3
> 
> Apologies for the long break between updates--the "during" chapters are from Dean's POV, and due to the awful situation he's in, they are proving quite difficult to wrangle. Next up, we're back to the present day. Should be up a lot sooner than this one!
> 
> Also, a note: the standard surgical treatment for Oligodendroglioma does--in rare occasions--result in hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and homicidal ideation. So basically, it's fucking horrible but medically feasible that John should experience this kind of breakdown after his treatment. Like the tags say--cancer is the real bad guy in this situation. Ugh :(


End file.
